The Laughing Spider #23
Everything tasted purple.
Not looked purple. Not smelled purple. Tasted. Like someone had turned synesthesia into a permanent state and Jake's brain -- was it still Jake? That name felt slippery, like trying to hold water -- couldn't tell sensations apart anymore.
His hands were doing something. Moving. Twitching. Playing piano on his thighs even though there was no piano. Tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP. The rhythm was important. Or maybe it wasn't. Hard to tell. Everything felt important and meaningless simultaneously.
"Hey."
A voice. Female. Painted face swimming into view. Pretty. Dangerous. Familiar in a way that made his chest hurt-but-not-hurt. Like nostalgia for something that happened five minutes ago.
Who was she again?
"HEY. Bug boy."
Bug boy. That was... him? Maybe? The name fit like a costume. Like something he could wear or take off. Not real. Nothing felt real except the laughter bubbling in his chest like champagne left too long in the sun.
"Ahehe... hehe... sorry, sorry..." The words fell out of his mouth without permission. "Was thinking about... about..." What was he thinking about? Gone now. Slipped away like soap.
The painted lady crouched down. Eye level. Her makeup was running, black rivers down white shores. Beautiful disaster. "Can you understand me?"
Could he? The words made sense individually but strung together they became a puzzle. Understand. Me. Two concepts that used to connect but now just floated separately in his skull.
He nodded anyway. His head kept nodding. Bob-bob-bob-bob. Funny. Like those toy dogs in car windows.
"Good. That's good." She sounded relieved. Why? "You went in dead. Came out laughing."
Dead. Laughing. The words triggered something. A memory? A dream? He'd been hanging. Upside-down. Everything green and burning and swallowing him whole. And then nothing. And then this.
This whatever-this-was.
"Her puddin' did that too," he said. Or did she say it? The boundaries were blurry. "Puddin'. That's funny. Why is that funny?"
"Because you're broken, bug boy." She stood, circling him. A bat dragged across metal. Scraaaape. The sound had colors. Blue-gray-silver. "Broken perfect."
Broken. Yes. That felt right. All his pieces were still there but assembled wrong. Like someone had tried putting him back together using instructions for a different person.
"I can be..." What could he be? The thought escaped. "...something. Whatever. I'm very flexible. Bendy. Not physically, that'd be weird, but mentally I'm like... like..."
"Like my good boy?"
Good boy. The words sank into him like fishhooks. Caught something deep in his rewired brain and pulled. Made him want to wag a tail he didn't have.
"YES." Too loud. He was being too loud. "Yes-yes-yes. Good. Very good. The goodest. I can fetch. Do you need fetching? I'm excellent at fetching."
Why was he saying this? Somewhere buried under the laughter and the wrongness, a tiny voice screamed. Resisted. Clawed at the inside of his skull trying to get out.
But the chemicals were stronger. The pheromones wrapped around his neurons like vines, choking out everything except the need to please her. To make her smile. To be useful.
He hated it.
He loved it.
He couldn't tell the difference anymore.
"Yeah?" She was smiling now. Teeth showing. Shark smile. "You're gonna fetch something for me, bug boy. Something you took. Something precious."
Took. He'd taken something. Multiple somethings. His brain tried to catalog them but the list dissolved into giggles.
"The shiny things!" he announced proudly. "I collected shiny things. Like a magpie. Or a dragon. Dragons collect stuff, right? But they sit on it. I didn't sit on them. I did something else. Something..."
What did he do with them? The memory was there, just out of reach, laughing at him.
"My mallet," she said. Voice hard. "My 'Good Night.' Big. Heavy. Beautiful. You remember?"
Mallet. The word triggered images. Red and blue text floating in his vision. Numbers counting down. A hunger that felt like gravity pulling him toward objects that sang.
"The hungry things," he said. "I found the hungry things. They wanted me. Or I wanted them. We wanted each other. It was very mutual."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"The... the..." What were they called? He'd had a word for them. Something important. Something that explained everything. But the chemicals had eaten that word along with everything else. "The yummy-yummies. No, that's not right. The sparkle-bits. The..." He made frustrated gestures. "The things that make the clocky-clock go!"
Her face was doing something complicated. Confusion mixed with anger mixed with something else. "You're not making sense."
"NOTHING MAKES SENSE!" He was laughing again. Couldn't stop. The sound echoed off the factory walls, multiplying until it felt like a hundred versions of him were laughing in unison. "Sense went out the window when I went in the goop! Now everything's sideways and purple-tasting and you're so pretty when you're confused!"
She hit him.
The bat connected with his head. CRACK. His vision went white-then-black-then-colors-that-didn't-exist. He fell. Hit the metal grating. His skull probably fractured. Probably concussed on top of already being concussed.
He giggled.
"Stop. Laughing." Each word punctuated with another hit. Ribs. Shoulder. Spine. "Tell me where my mallet is!"
His body was already knitting itself back together -- wrong, probably, but functional. Bones setting at odd angles because the chemicals kept rewriting the healing instructions. Like trying to build a house while someone kept changing the blueprints mid-construction.
"Can't!" The giggles wouldn't stop. Erupting from his mouth like hiccups. "It's gone-gone-gone! I made it disappear. Magic trick. Now you see it, now you don't, now it's inside me!" He tapped his chest. "Living here. With all the other hungry-yummies I gobbled up."
"You ATE it?!"
"Not ate. That's not the right word." He knew the right word once. Consumed? Absorbed? Redeemed? The vocabulary had dissolved. "I did the thing. The thing where it goes poof and becomes time-numbers. The clocky-clock thing."
Another hit. This one should have broken something important. Maybe it did. Hard to tell when pain was just another sensation swimming in the chemical soup of his brain.
"You're lying." But her voice wavered.
"Wish I was!" His less broken hand mimed eating. "Nom nom nom. But not with my mouth. With my... my essence? My soul? Whatever part of me is doing the hungry-thing. That part ate it." He paused. "Does that mean I pooped it out somewhere? Metaphysically?"
CRACK. Another hit. Right in the face this time. His nose definitely broke. Blood ran down into his mouth. Tasted like copper and victory.
He laughed harder.
"STOP--" She raised the bat again.
He was still laughing. Looking up at her with one eye swelling shut and blood painting his teeth red. "Can't stop. That part's broken. The stop-laughing part. It drowned in the green stuff. Everything drowned except the funny."
She lowered the bat slowly. Staring at him like he was a puzzle she couldn't solve.
"You don't feel it," she whispered.
"Feel what?" He touched his broken nose experimentally. It moved wrong. Hilarious. "Oh, you mean the ouchies? Nah. Those are happening to someone else. I'm just watching. We're all watching. Me and the other me's in my head. We're having a great time."
"You're crazy."
"Ding ding DING!" He tried to ring an invisible bell but his fingers were doing their own thing, conducting an orchestra only he could hear. "Winner winner chicken dinner! Do I get a prize? Is the prize more hitting? I love prizes."
She was laughing now too. Not her manic cackle. Something quieter. Horrified. "No. You were crazy before. Before any of this. You had to be. Nobody sane eats a mallet."
"Didn't eat, did the other thing--"
"How could you eat my 'Good Night'?" Her voice cracked. Real pain bleeding through. "If you knew all the places it had been. The things it touched. The bones it broke. That mallet was my LIFE."
The words triggered something. Images flooding his fractured mind. The mallet crushing skulls. Painted hands gripping the handle. Blood and laughter and chaos.
His stomach lurched. His face went greener. He made exaggerated gagging sounds, miming vomit.
"What are you--"
"Gonna puke," he gasped between giggles. "All those places. Can taste them. Can taste the memories. The skull bits. The brain matter. It's coming back up. Oh god. Oh no. The emotional significance is too heavy--"
"HEY!" She flushed. "Those are glorious places! GLORIOUS! You should be so lucky to--"
He stopped mid-heave. Looked at her. Really looked. Saw the flush on her cheeks, the defensive anger, the implication hanging in the air.
"Oh. OH." His giggle turned into a full laugh. "You mean the sexy places. The naughty places. The places where clothes come off and--"
He reached for her without thinking. Just an impulse. Touch pretty angry lady.
WHACK.
The bat hit his fingers. Multiple bones cracked. His hand crumpled into a modern art sculpture.
He yanked it back, cradling it against his chest. "Ow ow ow!" But he was still laughing. The pain was there somewhere but it couldn't reach him through the chemicals. "Sorry! Sorry! The hands moved on their own! They're not good listeners!"
"Not now, you naughty bug." But she was smiling. Actually smiling.
His broken hand throbbed distantly. He looked at it. It hung wrong. Fingers pointing directions they shouldn't.
Funny.
His eyes drifted past her. To something on a shelf. Green and perfect and singing to him.
The pretty-pretty.
No. The flower-thing.
No. The...
He didn't have a word for it. But every cell in his body was screaming for it. The hunger was worse now, amplified by the chemicals, by whatever had broken in his brain, by the numbers flashing in his peripheral vision that he couldn't quite read anymore.
He lurched forward. Hands reaching.
"Red's rose worked better than I expected," she was saying somewhere behind him. Her voice was dreamy. Far away. "Ground the petals right into the chemical bath. Mixed Ivy's mind-poison with Joker's body-poison. Two kinds of crazy for the price of one." She giggled. "If only she was here. To see me now. To see what I built."
His fingers were inches from the green thing. The hungry-yummy. The clocky-clock fuel.
"Do you think they put her with Mister J? In Arkham? Like a reunion?"
CRACK.
The bat hit his reaching hand. More bones broke. His fingers collapsed into abstract shapes.
He pulled back, giggling. "Bad hand. Naughty hand. Didn't ask permission."
"Bad Spider," she corrected. "Touchy Spider." She was between him and the pretty-pretty now. Blocking it. "Red trusted me to keep that safe."
He cradled both broken hands. They were matching now. Symmetrical. Art.
"What is it with you and wanting other people's precious stuff?" she demanded. "First my mallet. Now Red's flower. You got a problem?"
"Not a problem." He was still staring at the green thing. The pull was unbearable. Like gravity. Like magnetism. Like every instinct screaming at once. "It's a need. A hunger. The hungry-yummies make the clocky-clock go and if the clocky-clock stops then..."
What happened when it stopped? The answer was drowning in his skull somewhere. Buried under laughter and chemicals and the overwhelming need to make her smile.
"Then bad things?" she offered.
"The WORST things. Or maybe nothing. Hard to remember. Memory's all goopy now."
She studied him. Really studied him. He could see her brain working behind her eyes.
Then her phone beeped.
She pulled it out. Checked the screen. Her whole body tensed.
"We got company," she said quietly.
Company. The word meant something. People coming. Bad people? Good people? The distinction felt meaningless.
"The fun kind?" he asked.
"The kind that want you dead."
Dead. That was... bad? Probably bad. Though death seemed like just another weird sensation at this point. Like purple-tasting. Like broken hands that didn't hurt.
She grabbed her bat. Rolled her shoulders. Preparing for something.
He stood. Swayed. His broken hands dangled. His vision was doing kaleidoscope things. His mind was seventeen places at once and none of them made sense.
But the laughter bubbled up anyway. Unstoppable. Effervescent. Pure.
"Good," he giggled. "I love fun."
She looked at him. Really looked. Her expression shifted into something complicated.
"You're gonna get us both killed, aren't you?"
"Probably!" He was grinning so wide his face hurt. Or didn't hurt. Hard to tell. "But it'll be HILARIOUS."
The factory doors groaned. Opening. Footsteps echoing.
The company was here.
And Jake -- the Laughing Spider -- whatever he was now -- couldn't stop giggling.